Millions watch Victoria strut on the ‘Net

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the victoria's secret fashion show was broadcast live on the 'net from cannes, france, yesterday and more than two million viewers logged on to watch the show.

last year, the company broadcast its first ever live 'net show and the majority of would-be viewers were left unable to logon due to technical problems arising from the company's inability to support the deluge of traffic. as a result of last year's troubles, victoria's secret had boosted capacity 10-fold and had inked deals with yahoo!, ibm, microsoft, akamai technologies, and others to ensure a smooth delivery.

joel's opinion
i tuned in to test out the technology behind the broadcast firsthand. i initially fired up the site around 1 p.m. est and was greeted with a page giving me an option of which viewer i wanted to use: either microsoft or real player. i then watched a quick intro telling me to stay tuned.

at around 2:58 p.m. est i logged on again and began watching streaming video and audio of the preview to the event. at this point the quality had started to break down with the audio still streaming and the video freezing up. this was the case for both microsoft and real player.

once the broadcast began, a small 2×2 inch window appeared and the soundtrack fired up. for the duration of the show i could hear the audio fine but the video kept freezing on and off. i switched back and forth to real player and microsoft's own player and both were experiencing the same difficulties.

i was connected through a 56k dial-up and watched the streaming stats during the show. it turns out that even though i had more than enough bandwidth ready on my side, i was only receiving streams of about 1.1 kb per second instead of the usual 4-5 kb that could be expected.

while victoria's secret is saying it successfully delivered the show to over two million people, i'm wondering how many of those two million had an experience just like mine.

one more thing: last year i couldn't even log on during the show, so the company definitely made some improvements for this year's broadcast.